Undergrads from Hawaiʻi Help Map Galaxy Through Scialog Team’s Collaboration
Front row from left: 2022 program participants Jean Claude Dumaslan, Kaleo Toguchi-Tani, Kiana Ejercito, Jessica Nagasako and Luke Benavitz, with Dan Huber, Robyn Sanderson and Sukanya Chakrabarti. Back row: postdoc Dan Hey and graduate student Aldo Sepulveda.
Eight students from Hawaiʻi have participated in the first two years of a summer astronomical research program for undergraduates that began with a Scialog: Time Domain Astrophysics collaborative award.
Scialog Fellows Sukanya Chakrabarti, University of Alabama in Huntsville, Daniel Huber, University of Hawaiʻi, and Robyn Sanderson, University of Pennsylvania, received a team award in 2019 for their collaborative proposal, Beyond Gaia: Expanding the Dynamical Map of the Milky Way with Asteroseismic Distances. The proof-of-concept study arising from their initial groundwork led to a large collaborative Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Grant from the National Science Foundation to apply their method to a much larger sample, mapping distances across the galaxy, and to involve local undergraduates in an astronomical research program.
“We truly would not have come together without the Scialog framework,” said Sanderson, “Now this is one of my favorite teams of collaborators to work with."
Students from Hawaiʻi are historically underrepresented on college campuses and especially in STEM fields.
“In Hawaiʻi, we have a lot of observatories and a lot of people doing astronomy, but most of them are not from here,’ Huber said. “We wanted to increase the number of people from Hawai’i working in astronomy, and one way to do that is to get out to the community and get people engaged in research.”
The summer program has enabled astronomy and physics undergraduates, all of whom grew up in Hawaiʻi, to learn what it's like to be an astronomer through real research. Using a novel technique to measure the distances of stars in the farthest regions of the Milky Way, the work aims to create the largest 3D map of our home galaxy.
"One of our goals for this interdisciplinary project is to produce a new map of the neutral hydrogen gas in the outskirts of our galaxy using the accurate distances produced by Professor Huber and his postdoc, Dan Hey,” said Chakrabarti. “This map will give us a more realistic and accurate understanding of dwarf galaxy interactions with the Milky Way."
The students spent 10 weeks in residence at University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, though much of the work was done remotely in 2021. They were mentored by Chakrabarti, Huber and Sanderson, as well as Hey and several graduate students including Nondh Panithanpaisal and Arpit Arora at the University of Pennsylvania. The program will run again in 2023, and possibly 2024.
The research is using data from ground-based telescopes that scan the whole sky, including several in Hawaiʻi -- the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) on Haleakalā on Maui and on Mauna Loa on the island of Hawai’i, and the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN), which involves smaller telescopes including one on Haleakalā.
Some of the students’ research is observational, looking at pulsations in the light curve of individual stars to measure distances. Other research by the group is theoretical, using the 3D map to refine models of the galaxy. The students are sharing their research at national conferences such as the annnual meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) and some may end up publishing papers with their results.
Sanderson said one student from the first cohort, Jay Baptista, is about to submit his work on how the orientation of galaxy dark matter halos tells us about their assembly history. He’s applying for graduate schools and will present his work at AAS.
Huber said the research has provided students a strong exposure to the Python coding system used to analyze data, which is a basic skill in today’s astronomy research.
“It’s been a steep learning curve for some, but it’s going to be useful for them no matter where they go in their careers,” he said. “Those skills are applicable to a wide range of professions, be it STEM or data science or industry.”
Sanderson added: “We hope to have inspired the program participants to keep studying astronomy, because they have certainly inspired us with their energy and dedication!"
